I loved the original iA Writer from 2010 for its Focus Mode: one tap of a button blurred all other paragraphs, leaving just the current sentence centered on the screen. The app was very simple, but I felt it did real credit to the idea of a distraction-free writing environment. No extra menus, no fiddling with fonts or spacing — just sit down and write.

Writer Pro came out as a paid upgrade in 2013 and brought a wealth of new features with it. Hardware keyboard shortcuts were a welcome upgrade and Syntax Control — which could actively isolate nouns, verbs and adverbs, conjunctions, and adjectives — was intriguing because it provided a very different way of examining your own writing. At its coolest, Syntax Control felt like “bullet time” for writing, providing a sense of self-awareness that was hard to gain in more crowded writing applications. However, on the whole, I really just stuck to Focus Mode.